


i've taken on my nightmares (i've become my nightmares)

by pawn_vs_player



Series: leave the light behind [4]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Heroes to Villains, Metafiction, Not Steve Rogers Friendly, Obsessive Behavior, Social Issues, Villain Steve Rogers, disregards Infinity War: Part One, i'm not exactly subtle about who those other characters are, references to other characters - Freeform, uh...vague references to gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-05-28 15:13:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15051971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pawn_vs_player/pseuds/pawn_vs_player
Summary: An exploration of why Steve Rogers makes a better villain than a hero.(Yes, I am completely serious.)





	i've taken on my nightmares (i've become my nightmares)

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a slightly modified quote from Marilyn Manson.  
> The basis for this is something I started to write to a friend, then realized I could make a fic (or something vaguely resembling a fic) out of it:  
>  _"Steve has changed - or, at least, the things he's doing have changed. He's the same person, and frankly, that's more terrifying to me, because the person who collapsed a tunnel on civilians and recruited a HYDRA terrorist (one with no desire to change her ways, mind you) is the same person who crashed a bomber-plane into the Arctic to save a city and helped stop an alien invasion._  
>  _"Quite frankly, Steve Rogers - surprising as it is to say - is better as a villain these days."_

See, the thing is - 

_The thing is -_

Character arcs usually involve change in the character, right? We've heard the stories.

Here's one: the carefree billionaire weapons manufacturer gets a new heart, a new perspective, and a new set of sunglasses. He finds out where his weapons are being sold, a person who helped him dies poetically, he goes home and tries to fix things only to be betrayed and hurt, he almost dies but the villain dies instead. Character development. An asshole becomes Earth's greatest hero, except that he's never given credit for all the good he does, only the wrongs he failed to prevent. 

Or, how about this one: a teenage boy is bitten by a spider and gains abilities unlike anyone else. He's a teenage boy, so he's naive and idealistic and a little reckless, so he fights crime in a hoodie and comes home with the bruises already fading; and he fights until someone he loves dies to a crime he might've prevented, if only he'd been there sooner! Oh, the irony! So he's driven to keep fighting, to fight harder and longer, because of guilt and love and  _responsibility_ , even though he's fifteen and the only things he should be fighting for are his math grades.

Or this one, perhaps: a brash, spoiled alien prince leads a genocide against the people his father has told him are monsters, and is cast down to a backwater planet without his innate powers as punishment. He finds a pretty girl and a scientist and a funny sidekick, he proves himself worthy of his power, and he saves the world that saved him, only he's saving it from his brother who isn't his brother, really, because the brother-who-isn't is of the species the prince tried to eliminate, and he's trying to take over the realm he was raised in. So the prince has to send his brother to death to save two worlds, and he'll live with that forever, and he'll never ask his father the king why he kept the secret of his maybe-brother's heritage, why he didn't stop the prince from killing all those people in the first place, why he put him down on a backwater planet that was waiting for something bigger to come from beyond the stars. 

One more, for argument's sake: a girl who was never a girl, a girl with hair as red as the blood on her hands and her heart, a girl who was raised an assassin, who knows only how to kill and lie and steal. A killer who thinks that maybe she can be more than a monster, so she defects to the better side, she defects to become an agent who still kills and lies and steals but she works for the good guys now, really, she kills the people who made her a monster and that makes it better, she kills the people who want to kill others and that means it balances out, she manipulates a dying man into helping her agency and tells him he's never going to be good enough because it's what her commanders want. A woman, a killer, a never-mother, a liar, a thief ( _you lie and kill in the service of liars and killers)_ who wants to clean the red off her hands but will never, ever manage it, because the death of a monster is still a death, but she's trying, she's still trying, but  _she will never be clean._

People have to change, to be better. Pain as a scalpel, right, suffering carving off the excess flesh and baring the bones of this person, this person who can be more if only the right things happen to them. An uncle dead in a boy's arms and a secret held behind his teeth, a chest broken open and a dying doctor at a man's feet, a brother who only brings trouble and a family legacy of cruelty and conquest, a woman trying not to be a monster who has skills only a monster can use and a ledger dripping scarlet.  _The right things,_ death and guilt, torture and guilt, mutilation and guilt, blood and -

_(weapons don't care what they do and she is a weapon, always, for the Red Room or for SHIELD or for the Captain, she is a weapon but she chooses her master)_

\- something. (This woman had guilt carved out of her when she was a girl, before she was a monster. She has something else, but it's not for me to say what it is.)

 ~~~~(I'm getting off topic. This isn't about these people.)

 _Anyway,_ the point is - people change. People are broken down into their base components and remade into heroes, wires making new connections and all the gears unstuck. They're cracked and stumbling people, sometimes, but heroes are not made from perfect people. (Perfect people don't exist.) Heroes are made when Nature's hammer shatters some poor unlucky sap into shards, and then Nature's hands puts those shards back together in a slightly different shape.

Heroes are made of broken things, okay, that's one point I'm trying to make. Not _the_ point, mind you, but _a_ point, an important one. 

That point being, if you haven't gotten it already: change is painful, change is a sledgehammer to a glass statue, and heroes are what's left behind in the wake of change - heroes are the things left behind that we find pretty, attractive, nice enough to pick up and take home and admire.

There are two things that come from change: heroes, yes, we know that by now.

Villains come from change, too. 

But villains don't come from personal change. Not always. Not the way heroes do. 

Some villains come from the absence of change. A man who'd ruled a company the same way for decades, threatened by a man with a new heart, who did exactly what he'd always done and  _got rid of the problem_ except for once, this time, it didn't work, and he was got rid of instead. A father who'd run his company the same way for years and years, and then the world started changing and he didn't want to, so he dug in his heels and stole things and hurt people. A daughter who was raised to kill and conquer, who did her job so well and with such joy that she was locked in a cage and left to rot. A room stained with blood full of bodies, full of killers and victims and little girls and older girls, a room that never cared about anything but results.

Some villains are heroes, once upon a time, before things change. Some villains kill the dragon and save the princess, then come home to the castle and find out the dragon was the warden and the princess burned down a kingdom. Some villains save one princess and kill one dragon, then decide to live their life doing the same thing over and over, because if one princess was good and one dragon was bad then they must all be the same. Some villains kill one dragon and save one princess, and get hooked on the power and the glory of it all, and go on rampaging through the kingdoms looking for beasts to slay and maidens to rescue, because they're the  _hero of the story_ and they haven't reached their happy ending yet.

Some villains grow up small and sick and weak, knocked down and unheard. Some villains grow up the underdog, the good guy. Some villains are seen as a chance to make things better, the hero-to-be, the Chosen One. Some villains are heroes, _once upon a time,_ and they save lives and kill a many-headed dragon and die for the cause, the greater good. Some villains wake up in a world that doesn't need their brand of hero anymore, and they don't try to change, they dig in their heels and fight and fight and fight (and don't pay attention to whom they're fighting, the whole world has done them wrong, the whole world is at fault, the whole world is the enemy). 

Some villains become villains and never even realize. (And is that a tragedy or a comedy, do you think, that a murderer who killed to keep a killer safe thinks he is in the right?) 

Some men just want to watch the world burn. Other men light the world ablaze and never see the flame. Other men set a fire and blame it on the match, or the air, or the wood.

There is a man who froze for seventy years - in ice, in his ways, in his time, in his beliefs. There is a man who woke up in a world that moved on (a world that  _didn't need him_ ) and couldn't handle it. There is a man who clings to what was with both hands and fights away anything and everything ( _anyone and everyone_ ) that tries to drag him into what is. There is a man who is a villain, who kills and lies in concert with killers and liars, and who still sees himself as the hero.

(And is that a tragedy or a comedy, do you think, that the villain thinks himself a hero and the hero thinks himself a villain?)


End file.
